My diary, which used to feel like a familiar friend, feels cold in my hands. The leather no longer bears the same warmth, and the pages don't beckon to me like they did back in the palace. But I know I need to write. I feel that same itching in my fingers. I don't know where to start.
"How about a date?" Katara says. She's too kind. She always has been. She healed my ears, slept in the same room as me when dreams of blue lightning, lightning that never touched me, plagued my nights. We stayed up late and laughed, even when it seemed like laughter had been sucked out of the world. And she was right, so right. I always start with a date.
1892年4月09日
I'm on a ship. It's been a few weeks since my seemingly nondescript last entry. I'm not really sure how to start this entry out. There's so much to say, and my hands still shake.
"I'm going to go up on deck. Write as much as you need to." I grunt in response, without turning around. I feel bad, but Katara bends my tea just a little bit warmer and shuts the metal door hard behind her.
I ended by saying that I was going to go through the courtyard to the kitchen. I did. I made a short detour to the food archives to see if I could find anything on Northern style cooking. I didn't, so I kept on walking. I remember the long cypress shadows dwarfing my own, and for the first time in my life feeling smaller than anything.
It made me so aware of the blood burning inside of me.
I found a cave.
The burning called to me. I went in. I was wearing my dirty green kitchen qipao and holding nothing but this diary and a bag of fruit. The only trinket from home I still had was the red brooch. I shouldn't be attached to material things but I lost all the letters from Natsuko, from Mother. I lost Mother's gold-trimmed kimono and all the money I ever stole from Muraki. My whole life, tucked in a wooden chest under a bunk in the western servant's quarters in the Earth King's palace in Ba Sing Se. I never called it home but now I think I should have.
It was so dark. I tripped over stones and ripped my sandals open. It took me so much willpower to not light a fire in my palm. The burning kept surfacing. I breathed sparks like I do when I'm angry. Then I lit a tiny fire at the end of my finger, no larger than the fire at the end of a match. I rolled my sleeve up and kept my arm at a distance, like I was trying to prove to myself that my arm didn't belong to me.
I thought the crystal catacombs were legend. This, among many other things, was a lie.
I reached the catacombs and found chaos. Five very different people were in the throes of an intense fight. There was the brown-skinned girl (she I noticed first), the boy with the blue tattoos, the boy with the burned eye, the old man, and the girl in green. I know now that they are called Katara, Aang, Zuko, Iroh, and Azula.
It was so hard to understand what happened. I saw firebenders for the first time in my life. I kept thinking that I wish I'd been trained so I could help, but then that high-pitched cackling voice in my head laughed in my face: "help who?" it asked. And I was soberly reminded of why I had to hide my firebending all my life, why I had kept such an integral part of myself secret for so long.
The Fire Nation was the enemy.
I took a long, rattling breath. It felt like I'd kept it in for hours. I put out my candle and lit it again.
Aang did something incredible (Katara tells me it's called the Avatar State) but Azula shot him down. Then everything went slowly. I helped carry Aang through a passageway to this huge behemoth I thought was the stuff of fairytales. We all sat on the saddle. I rubbed the Avatar's temples with Asparagus-pear meat, feeling my fingertips tingle and hoping his mind would ease. Katara bent water from a vial and pressed it into Aang's back. He was okay. Ba Sing Se, not so much.
I fell asleep after that. I woke up right at dawn like I'm used to, feeling oddly weightless. We were flying over desert, towards the coast. I picked up a piece of charcoal from the folds of the Earth King's robes and wrote my last entry.
I spent the last few weeks recovering. Everyone was. Emotionally as well as physically. Aang is still asleep. While I've befriended his whole group, he has no idea who I am or why I'm on this hijacked Fire Nation ship. Hell, I don't even know why I'm here.
I shut my diary. I breathe a little, but it comes out hoarse, ragged. I can feel the sparks smoldering at the back of my throat. I poke my head out of the porthole and exhale. A smallish wave of fire seeps out of my mouth, leaving my lips dry but unharmed. I feel appeased, for now. I slap some water onto my face and head out of the door without looking up at the mirror above the water basin. I haven't looked in a mirror since Ba Sing Se. I don't want to see what I look like.